imagined an athletics program where the budget is almost fifty million dollars. This huge ouday of expenses and energy and visibility of sports is just clearly out of proportion with what it showd be. Yes, athletics has a place in college education, but not this sort of massive space that it's taking." But what allowed Wood to so easily tag his anonymous evaluator as a lacrosse player was his conviction that the play- hard cohort was poisoning the campus cwture at Duke, and that lacrosse players were at the heart of the problem. Even before the lacrosse scandal, alarms had been sounded over the coars- ening of undergraduate life. Toward the end of Nan Keohane's tenure as presi- dent, the school undertook an extensive study examining the lives of women at Duke. The project's summation reads like a scholarly anticipation of Tom Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons," the 2004 novel (published after Wolfe's daughter graduated from Duke) portraying college life as a sow-deadening, booze-fuelled marathon of sexual predation: Students rarely go on formal dates but in- stead attend parties in large groups, followed by "hook-ups "-unplanned sexual encounters typically fueled by alcohol. Men and women agreed the double standard persists: men gain status through sexual activity while women lose status. Fraternities control the mainstream social scene to such an extent that women feel like they play by the men's rules. Social life is further complicated by a number of embedded hierarchies, from the widely understood rank- ing of Greek organizations to the opposite trajectories women and men take over four years, with women losing status in the campus environment while men gain status. When the lacrosse story broke, last spring, Elizabeth Chin's anthropology class was studying Margaret Mead's "Coming of Age in Samoa," occasioning lively inquiry into the mores governing Duke's undergraduate life. For Chin, a visiting professor from Occidental Col- lege, the sessions were surprising, and in- structive. Several of the young women in her class were members of Duke's élite so- rorities-the Core Four, as they are called. "The sorority women in partictÙar were trying to convince me that the sexually free and exploratory world that Mead de- scribes is pretty much the same thing as the hookup cwture," Chin recalls. She wasn't buying it. "The whole hookup thing is, you get really drunk so that, at some level, you can't be responsible," she says. "And then you hook up and then there's no obligation. It's bad manners, in fact, to sort of get emotionally connected to the person. But I don't think any of them like it that much. . . . It's dehuman- izing. And it's very alienating. It's sort of like they have to deaden themselves be- fore they can go do it." Peter Wood discerns in the Duke un- dergrad culture a widening milieu of studied vulgarity. "Do you know about the baby-oil bust?" he asked me. He was referring to an off-campus fraternity party last winter which featured bikini- clad coeds wrestling in a plastic wading pool filled with baby oil; the party, at- tended by two hundred people, dispersed when neighbors summoned the police. After the lacrosse incident in the Bu- chanan house, many of the adults at Duke were surprised to learn that the hiring of strippers was a familiar practice. Some of the strippers that come onto the Duke campus are men, Bob Steel told me, by way of offering context. "So it's . . " not Just men gettIng women. Wood contends that a relatively small group of social élites exert a growing influence over the broader undergraduate population. "It's an infection that spreads out," he says. The upper rungs of the "embedded hierarchies" cited by Keo- hane's study are vigorously contended over by the élite fraternities and sororities, but the alpha partyers at Duke are the members of the men's lacrosse team. The team is a fraternity unto itself: and is ac- corded the top prize of social striving: the deference of its peers. Coeds who are fa- vored with the company of players are k " 1 ." h nown as acrosstltutes, a term t at Wood was surprised to learn is not nec- essarily pejorative. A sharp-eyed cam- pus social critic, the widely read anony- mous blogger known as DukeObsrvr, summed up the men's lacrosse team's place in the social hierarchy this way: "Let's not kid ourselves, what frat doesn't hate these fuckers? The lacrostitute is a notch higher on the social scale than the 'frat slut.' And dammit that's something worth fighting over." P eter Wood and Orin Starn were among those who believed that the lacrosse scandal represented a rare oppor- tunity for Duke. Starn hoped that Duke wowd eventually pull out of Division I competition. In a conversation in late May, he told me that the first important indication of Duke' s direction would be a decision on whether or not to reinstate the lacrosse program. "I think it would be a huge mistake to go back to business as usual," he said. "Now, what happened, or didn't happen, I'm not sure we'll ever know. But at the very minimum we know that we have these guys hiring strippers, a record of underage drinking, and pretty strong evidence of the use of racial slurs." Less than a week later, Brodhead con- vened a press conference, and announced that he was reinstating the lacrosse pro- gram. "I am, I know, taking a risk," Brod- head said, in lifting the suspension of the team. He said that the reinstatement was probationary, that the players had agreed to live by a new set of rules, and their be- havior would be closely monitored. It had been exactly two months since Brodhead cancelled the season, on a day, April 5th, that he now characterized as "a day of great hysteria." Much had hap- pened since then. The committee exam- ining the lacrosse culture found no evi- dence that team members were racist or sexist. The players were regarded by their professors, ten of whom were surveyed, to be "academically responsible students." (The lone dissenter was Peter Wood.) The committee's principal findings might have been crafted by the lacrosse booster club. "By all accounts, the lacrosse players are a cohesive, hard working, disciplined, and respectful athletic team," the report said. "Their behavior on trips is described as exemplary. Players clean the team bus before disembarking. Airline personnel have complimented them for their behav- ior. They observe curfews. They obey the team's no alcohol rule before games. They are respectfw of people who serve the team, including bus drivers, airline person- nel, trainers, the equipment manager, the team manager, and the groundskeeper. Finally, the lacrosse program has a 100% graduation rate." As for the team's inclina- tion toward alcohol abuse, the report THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 4,2006 57